Book Review: ‘Russian Gothic,’ by Aleksandr Skorobogatov

In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to prop up a socialist government that had seized power in a coup. The 10-year conflict that followed feels like a footnote today, overshadowed by the American occupation. But the Soviet-Afghan war changed history, giving rise to jihadists like Osama bin Laden.

It also changed my history. My family was set to emigrate to the United States from Soviet Belarus as political refugees in 1979, right after I was born. The invasion prompted America to boycott the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics, and the U.S.S.R. retaliated by closing its doors to mass emigration. Nearly a decade passed before I managed to leave, already formidably shaped by my Soviet experiences, a mostly unhappy dichotomy that persists to this day.

Others fared far worse. Much as the Russian war in Ukraine is now sending home soldiers with no preparation for re-entry to a society that has subsisted on the conflict’s invisibility, the traumatized veterans of the Afghan war returned just in time for the dissolution of their country and a decade of political and economic chaos.

As one soldier told the Belarusian Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich for her 1989 oral history “Zinky Boys”:

We’re invited to speak in schools, but what can we tell them? Not what war is really like, that’s for sure. Should I tell them that I’m still scared of the dark and that when something falls down with a bang I jump out of my skin? How the prisoners we took somehow never got as far as regimental HQ? I saw them literally stamped and ground into the earth. … I can’t very well tell the school kids about the collections of dried ears and other trophies of war, can I?

Those “fortunate” enough to survive came home to a small one-time payment and the indifference, if not derision, of a nation kept in an information blackout about the war.

The Soviet-Afghan war comes up only once in RUSSIAN GOTHIC (Rare Bird Books, 122 pp., $25), a slim novel by the Belarus-born Aleksandr Skorobogatov that first appeared in 1991 and has just been published in translation in the United States. But that single, radioactive reference transforms our experience of the story from a private disturbance to a commentary on a nation. (The novel’s new title in English, fluffed up from the more prosaic Russian title, “Sergeant Bertrand,” seems to invite the enlargement.) The effect is both a gift and a curse: Russia’s troubled history amplifies the novel’s echo, but the country’s literary lineage makes for a tough comparison.

The action takes place in a “small, provincial, mediocre gray town,” where Nikolai, a veteran of the Afghan war who is married to a provincial actress named Vera, begins to succumb to the fevered, delirious certainty that his wife has been unfaithful. (“Vera” means “faith.”)

Nikolai’s suspicions arise after he is visited by a spectral figure named Sergeant Bertrand, who initially seems like one of Vera’s supposed suitors, nibbling gratefully on her fingers. But eventually Bertrand starts goading Nikolai about Vera’s fidelity as the latter drinks himself into a violent stupor, though there are quieter, even intimate moments when Nikolai reveals sordid childhood memories to Bertrand.

Vera, who receives beatings from Nikolai, lavishes him with something greater than even love and forgiveness: understanding. “You have no idea what he’s suffered, not the smallest idea!” she insists to the director of her theater, who tries to persuade her to leave her husband. And though Nikolai’s observations of Vera tend to focus on her physical beauty, he marvels at her with profound tenderness. Nikolai “only wanted one thing,” Skorobogatov writes, “to die there and then. … It was absurd, he knew. After all, how could he die, leaving her all alone in the world?”

It’s quintessential patriarchal love — protective, patronizing and abusive: “Pulling her back to face him by her still bare shoulder — its inexpressible, provoking beauty pained him — he slapped her hard in the face.” Nikolai’s ardor is a curtain; it seems unimaginable that he could unburden himself to Vera as he does to Bertrand, though the sergeant clearly exists only in his mind.

Skorobogatov imagines Nikolai’s mania as a kind of psychic call-and-response, with echoes of events that stylishly elide whether they are taking place in real life or in Nikolai’s tortured brain. For instance, Nikolai surreptitiously attends one of Vera’s performances, which turns out to feature an exact re-enactment of a scene that has ravaged Nikolai’s mind: her seduction by a superior. This occurs again toward the end of the novel — or does it? — when Nikolai lands in a mental institution and the chief psychiatrist offers Vera her husband’s freedom in exchange for sex.

This kind of literary patterning and ambiguity can feel familiarly clever. But this novel’s infernal distinction is that these moments recall the many times over the last century that Russians have had to see what isn’t there, and not see what was. Nikolai’s tragedy is that he can’t keep the dissonance to himself: He beats the actor who plays Vera’s superior to a pulp.

Pity the citizen whose thoughts rise to the surface in a totalitarian nation built on lies. In American literature, the experience of the grievously alienated personage tends to be the subject of comedy or camp. American outsiders or oddballs often turn into strivers and getters; they reshape the society that can’t accommodate them. Such is the surviving gift, and innocence, of capitalist democracy. (Yes, it still exists, especially to ex-Soviet eyes.)

But those schooled in Russian history and literature know this won’t end well for Nikolai or the people around him. In one of the novel’s more moving moments, Vera tries to assert the value of human will over Skorobogatov’s — and the nation’s — grim patterns by trying to fight off the chief psychiatrist. But he overpowers her. Nikolai receives his release, a freedom that can turn out only poorly for Vera. As it did for the country as a whole in the decade that followed the novel’s publication.

In moments like these, the novel elegantly recalls the great poets of delirium and madness that continue to be the reason people around the world turn to Russian literature: Dostoyevsky, Gogol. It also struggles to escape their shadows; Vera is so unremittingly saintly that it’s hard not to think of Sonya from “Crime and Punishment.” Even contemporary gothic Russian stories, such as Lyudmila Petrushevskaya’s “scary fairy tales,” rinse the palate with cheeky humor, an idiosyncratic element absent from Skorobogatov’s tale.

Russian-language books deserve to be evaluated without the pressure — or benefit — of geopolitics. After all, their native readers hardly read them that way. Without that shellac, “Russian Gothic” is a powerfully airless, demented little book whose fever proceeds with unbearable lucidity, both of prose and of mind.

Of course, paranoia and self-awareness work at cross-purposes, but writing the novel in third person has allowed Skorobogatov and his excellent translator, Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse, to give us a lambent portrait of madness. “Answer came there none,” Chavasse renders one moment when Nikolai asks who else in the mental ward needs a beating. It’s the syntax of a dark fairy tale indeed.